Is low salt intake correlated with heightened health risks?

In the past, there’s truly been no shortage in the amount of paranoia that some people have had in regard to salt. For as long as many dieters can remember, there’s been a stigma associated with sodium that has motivated people to treat salty foods like poison.

In the Lancet, a report authored by Andrew Mente of McMaster University’s School of Medicine implied that the only people who truly need to be wary of salt intake are those who already have high blood pressure. The studies suggested that the current dietary suggestions for daily salt intake, at under 2300 milligrams, might actually be lower than what’s conducive to the best possible state of health.

To reach the study’s findings, over 130,000 people from 49 countries were examined in a sample group. The results showed that heart attacks, strokes and death were negatively somewhat correlated with the sodium intake levels of participants with low-salt diets. Salt has historically been implicated as an agent that could exacerbate weight loss stalling through water retention, but there recent findings might pose a challenge to the idea that dietary health be necessarily qualified through weight loss alone.